However, at the same time apparently Larry Ellison was advising her. During the early phase of Oracle's history one of their chief criticisms is over-promising on timelines to keep existing customers on their product so that they assumed something was going to ship in 90 days only to ship 1.5 years later.
However, Theranos took this to the edge and just flat out lied about products that they didn't have.
They were promising revolutionary breakthoughs not evolutionary.
Investors: by the Walton family ($150 million), Rupert Murdoch ($121 million), Betsy DeVos ($100 million), the Cox family (of Cox Media Group) ($100 million), and Robert Kraft (of the New England Patriots).
You would figure there was no faking these people out. How do you dupe former Secretary of States and Generals whom are supposed to be some of the most stringent, dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's. It's just an amazing story of how personality can change everything and cause people to have massive blindspots.
Also if I recall, there was a lack of medical knowledge on the board as well which surely contributed to the failures in oversight.
Interesting, considering Steve Jobs acknowledged Ellison as his best friend after his return to Apple, at a time when Oracle was considered the 2nd largest software company in the world. It makes sense that she would turn to Ellison for advice all in the name of trying to be like her idol, Steve Jobs.
Holmes underestimated the amount of technical risk she needed to overcome to succeed in the marketplace, as did the Google founders when Larry Page initially came up with PageRank but had no clue just how long it would take to download the entire web to disk. But the Google guys unlike Holmes had a lot of help from their advisors combined with Stanford university resources, which allowed them to stay immune to investor pressure to show results for invested capital.
For a technology like finger-prick based tests to succeed, you’ll need to expend millions of USD in a university research lab before you begin to see promising results that are repeatable. Essentially, Theranos should have started out as a science project (like BackRub which birthed Google) and not as a startup. She picked the wrong vehicle for her mission.
Ellison on the other hand piggy-backed on a seminal 1970 paper by IBM researcher: E.F. Codd to launch Oracle [0]. In those days, hierarchical and network databases were the competing database paradigms. Codd’s paper introduced the relational model as the third competing paradigm which turned out to be vastly simpler than the other models. The simplicity afforded by RDBMSes unlocked a lot of value and ultimately created wealth for the database industry.
0: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_c...